


punch like bone

by LieutenantSaavik



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Slash, Sort-of, references to the endverse, set during 5x04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:41:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28185573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LieutenantSaavik/pseuds/LieutenantSaavik
Summary: Cas continues to stare at him. Quiet compassion surrounds him, pulsing out from his gaze like a soft melody. It wraps around Dean in the darkness, and it’s the closest he’s ever come to feeling forgiven for what has come undone. Cas is beautiful in the streetlights, Dean thinks distantly, a feeling too new and tender for him to strangle it just yet. Not the vessel--because that’s a generic businessman at best and Dean wouldn’t hit that if youpaidhim--but the impossible force behind it, and the impossible kindness behind that force. This is not a tortured, half-damned druggie pimp out of his mind with amphetamines and absinthe. This is not a lofty and unreachable stuck-up holy ghost. This is Cas.HisCas.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 24
Kudos: 234





	punch like bone

It’s a shitty future. Bleak doesn’t even begin to cover it.

And it shouldn’t be a shock. Dean _knows_ , knows right to the core of everything he’s made himself into, that it’s gonna get bloody. One of these days this dance is gonna end and he’s gonna get gutted or gored or have his throat slashed, and the best he can hope for is one last snappy wisecrack as black crams itself around the edges of his eyelids and he probably shits himself. And he’s frightened of that. Of course he is.

Not that he would have the way with words to say that, not ever. 

But when he’s around Cas, he thinks he could. Because Cas _knows_ that Dean skirts around gulfs of rage and grief with a swagger, a wink, a toothy grin. Cas _knows_ that Dean is scared.

Dean doesn’t have emotions with grace. That’s Sam’s territory, and his is the ability to diffuse an argument, stifle an outburst, find the right thing to say when all Dean can do is fight or fuck or surrender. Sam can twist his way through life like sinew but Dean can only punch like bone. And Castiel saved him.

Again.

Castiel saved him from Zachariah. Cas saved him from Hell and then, just now, from Heaven. He chose Dean over Heaven.

_We had an appointment._

He didn’t even _say_ he would.

And as Castiel stands roadside, staring at him with a tranquil adoration that he doesn’t, that he _can’t_ deserve, he feels that Castiel sees his jammed-up gratitude. That Castiel could put it in words that Dean can’t even fathom. 

His face twitches. Stoic Cas, inhuman Cas, awkward and aloof and goddamn _unbelievable_ Cas, standing still like a rock in the center of a river. He is proud to call this being his friend. _His_ Cas, he thinks with a sudden choking fierceness. It rises in his throat like love. This is his Cas.

He reaches out to him, makes contact with his body, stares at the light cast up the sides of the planes of his face, his radiating ancient eyes crinkling at the corners, his imperturbable almost-smile. “Cas.” He lands his palm firm on the angel’s shoulder, subconsciously memorising the plastic texture of the flimsy trenchcoat, the sense of breached power hovering beneath it. He looks at Cas, drinks him, pulls him into his eyes, his solidness, his peace, his presence overwhelming. He can’t heave his heart into his mouth, he’s not a goddamn beat poet, but he can say something, determined and shaking with eyes that shine something awful with the threat of unspilled tears. “Don’t ever change,” he tells him with as much strength as he can muster. Skimming his fingers across Cas’s shoulder, he lets his hand fall.

Cas continues to stare at him. Quiet compassion surrounds him, pulsing out from his gaze like a soft melody. It wraps around Dean in the darkness, and it’s the closest he’s ever come to feeling forgiven for what has come undone. Cas is beautiful in the streetlights, Dean thinks distantly, a feeling too new and tender for him to strangle it just yet. Not the vessel--because that’s a generic businessman at best and Dean wouldn’t hit that if you _paid_ him--but the impossible force behind it, and the impossible kindness behind that force. This is not a tortured, half-damned druggie pimp out of his mind with amphetamines and absinthe. This is not a lofty and unreachable stuck-up holy ghost. This is Cas.

Cas cares. His Cas _cares_.

“How did Zachariah find you?” Cas asks. 

Dean can’t even begin to answer. “Long story. Let’s,” the implied ‘us’ sneaks in without him meaning it, “Just stay away from Jehovah's Witnesses from now on, okay?” He pulls out his phone, all business, breaking contact with Cas’s eyes.

“What are you doing?” Cas asks.

“Something I should have done in the first place.” Dean shifts his full attention away from the angel beside him. He feels as though he’s come back to earth.

  
  


He almost breaks down halfway through calling Sam. He knows Sam will want a reason for Dean’s sudden change of heart and he wants to give it, but he can’t, not yet, perhaps not ever. He tries to let Sam’s voice wash away the afterimages of Camp Chitaqua. Still, when his gaze wanders, in every pooling shadow he sees grime and guns and Croats, and himself as their militant king, their torturer. A warrior without an ideal is one step away from a terrorist. No flag to fly from the top of rebuilt rubble; arms are only raised to click reload and fire. Sex and booze and trash, beheadings. And a coldness in his eyes he’s only seen in--well, in John Winchester’s, when he hunts.

And yet they still followed him. Whatever fucked-up fanatic Dean had become, they followed him. Humanity’s filthy ragged remnants, and whatever Castiel had become, followed him. Tramped to their deaths like loyal foot soldiers, not like brothers-in-arms. All of them either too wacked out to notice or knowing full well what their final showdown would be. Stepping out anyway, for blind duty or just out of plain old fatigue. And it shouldn’t be jarring to see it, because Dean knows what it’s like. Find out what’s right and point yourself and your weapon toward it and shoot down whoever gets in your way until they shoot down you. That’s the world. That’s every version of it.

But he doesn’t want it to end like that. Not like that.

He doesn’t want to die alone. But no matter how many people you have huddled around, you always go through the actual process of death alone, just you and the ice-cold proffered smile of a Reaper. It’s not fear of dying lonely, then. It’s something more visceral, marrow-deep where Dean can’t tease it out. He doesn’t want it to be him.

He doesn’t say that to Sam. He tells him what’s quick and what’s core and he keeps the burden of five years of apocalyptic violence securely on his own shoulders because he’s Dean and that’s Sam and this is his god damned _job_ , because taking care of Sammy is the highest order he has ever been given and he will not, will _never_ , fail to carry it out. His voice is not steady but his words are clipped and careful, and through the phone he can sense Sam’s disbelief, his hesitation, and finally, his tenuous trust. It’s not forgiveness; Dean makes that clear, and Sam makes clear he knows it. But it’s a start.

He clicks the phone shut just as Sam thanks him and sighs with the ache of a task completed, expecting Cas to have blipped out of this dimension or whatever the fuck he gets up to when not manifestly butchering Dean’s personal space. But to his surprise the angel is still there, still staring at him with that ethereal compassion lit on his face.

“I can feel the echo of your pain,” he says in his gravelly voice like it’s nothing, and Dean’s lips part in surprise.

“Wh-what?” He jerks his head and blinks, eyes narrow and skeptical.

“Whatever you saw, whatever Zachariah forced you into,” Castiel’s gaze is close and focused, his eyes narrowing slightly and taking on a familiar prickling intensity as he leans toward Dean, “Gave you a sense of... horror.”

“Um,” Dean scratches the back of his neck, uses the momentum of the gesture to push himself a bit farther. “You could say that, yeah.”

“I’m,” Cas uses the words as if they have a foreign taste. “Sorry?”

“What.”

“Did I do it wrong.”

“No, no, it’s fine, 's fine. I just - didn’t expect it.”

Cas nods soberly. Dean can feel the weight on him clamping down like iron, like Hell’s rack. Every step is a bench press battle against this dogface brain of his. It doesn’t do _this_ well, this whole emotion hokum, this galaxy-far-far-away level of insane bullshit he’s been pummeled with for the past two years. And Cas makes it worse, Cas and his goddamn _ardent_ stare, and it turns Dean’s stomach and makes him want to retch into the grass. He just _saw_ he was a killer, not just of his enemies but of his allies too. He let Sam go. He let Cas fall. He doesn’t deserve either of them.

“You do,” says Cas bluntly, his gaze still uncanny, demonstrating an ability uncomfortably close to mind-reading. 

“Get out of my head,” Dean snaps, abrupt and vicious.

“I have never been in your head,” Cas says solemnly. “But I have seen your soul and I have come to know the self-destructive habits you protect it with. Confronted with a situation you are unprepared for, you lapse into the familiarity of the belief that you are,” he pauses to select his next human words, “Unworthy of what the Lord has given.”

Tentatively, he raises a hand, and Dean yerks himself backward. “What the hell are you talking about?!”

“You know,” Castiel says evenly, and there’s a note of sadness, disappointment even, in his tone. He withdrew his hand after Dean pulled himself away from it, but now he lifts it again, places it lightly on Dean’s shoulder as Dean had done. Dean goes still, and Cas slowly moves his hand from the shoulder to the mark his Grace burnt onto Dean’s skin. Dean shivers and Cas pulls his hand away.

“You are worthy, Dean Winchester,” Castiel says, eyes piercing. He leans in close, and for a bizarre world-tilting moment Dean thinks he’s going to fucking _kiss_ him. Instead, Cas just pins him with another electric stare, his face just inches away.

“You are my charge,” Castiel says, and his breath ghosts across Dean’s face. “I will not let harm befall you.”

He leans forward again, and Dean blinks, preparing himself for _something_ , but there’s a rustle of wings, and Castiel is gone.

Dean stands alone at the side of the road. Cold settles in around him.

“Thanks,” he mutters.

He kicks a pebble, then starts to walk.

**Author's Note:**

> written for @microclown on tumblr, who requested "soft cas." i hope this does okay!
> 
> thanks to winston churchill for making all this possible. no i will not be explaining. luv to all xx


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